Een Thee

I more or less gave up drinking tea when out and about in the US.  I soon learned that the Liptons tea-bags offered up in cafes and restaurants were insipid imposters and best left well alone.  I’m a pretty traditional girl at heart and a cuppa just isn’t a cuppa when it’s served with a slice of lemon and a squirt of honey. I hoarded a secret supply of Sainsburys Red Label in my cupboards and the daily cuppa became a guilty pleasure enjoyed in the comfort of my own home.

A good old fashioned cup of milky tea is the perfect  pick-me-up; it’s refreshing, comforting and calming. It makes you stop, sit down and relax.  It doesn’t get your heart pumping at ninety miles an hour like a  shot of caffeine loaded coffee, and it doesn’t rot your teeth or pile on the calories like a sweet sickly cup of hot chocolate.

It was hot and sunny in California. It didn’t matter if I stuck to cold  drinks while out socialising with friends, but when it’s grey and wet, like it is in the Netherlands 90% of the time, I want tea.

So, what do they serve up in the café’s here? You ask for een thee and you will be provided with a glass of hot water.  If you’re lucky it may be accompanied by a selection of tea-bags, or sometimes the tea-leaves will already sit infusing in the water. Either way I have discovered the only way to elicit any great taste from either the bags, or the leaves, is to leave them in the water for a very long time.  It would help of course, if the water was boiling, but when it’s served in a glass, this is simply not practical.

I never thought I’d end up writing an entire blog about a cup of tea, but today I encountered the most pretentious tea-bag ever, and I just have to show and tell.

It was the usual thing, ask for een thee, be presented with the glass of hot, or in this case, not particularly hot, water, followed by the presentation of an impressive tea-chest full of tea bags. The selection is usually the same wherever you go, Earl Grey, Chamomile, Green Tea, White Tea, Fruit Tea. Today, I choose aardbei – strawberry, and it wasn’t a case of picking a tea-bag from the box, but a heavy duty envelope, bearing an artist’s colourful impression of a juicy strawberry. Wow, I thought, this is way better than the usual sachets - it was like opening up an Oscar nomination, and there inside, not just a tea-bag, but a letter. Yes, a letter, for me, Beste theedrinker (dear tea drinker…) from the tea-leaf picker himself. Strawberry, he wrote, is his favourite fruit (I suspect he says that about every flavour) and the fruit is chosen to ‘soften’ the taste of the tea, which as it had very little taste, I took to mean total dilution. I also learned from my letter that my theeplukster picks 18 kilos of tea leaves a day which produces 4 kilos of pure black tea. Incidentally, the Dutch for tea leaves is theebladeren, which sounds particularly unpleasant.

So who knew one tea-bag could produce such a fascinating insight into the world of an entire tea plantation. Ten out of ten to the packaging guys. Just a shame they didn't put quite the same amount of effort into the actual taste of the tea.